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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Hamlet as we have it—usually in a conservative conflation of the second quarto and first folio texts—is not really Hamlet. The very fact that the Hamlet we know is an editor-made text has furnished an illusion of firm ground for leaping conclusions that discrepancies between the probable and actual actions, statements, tone, and diction of Hamlet are accidents of its transmission. Thus, in much the spirit of editors correcting printers’ errors, critics have proposed stage directions by which, for example, Hamlet can overhear the plot to test Polonius’s diagnosis of Hamlet’s affliction, or by which Hamlet can glimpse Polonius and Claudius actually spying on his interview with Ophelia. Either of these will make sense of Hamlet’s improbable raging at Ophelia in 3.1. The difficulty with such presumably corrective emendation is not only in knowing where to stop, but also in knowing whether to start. I hope to demonstrate that almost everything else in the play has, in its particular kind and scale, an improbability comparable to the improbability of the discrepancy between Hamlet’s real and expected behavior to Ophelia; for the moment, I mean only to suggest that those of the elements of the text of Hamlet that are incontrovertibly accidental may by their presence have led critics to overestimate the distance between the Hamlet we have and the prelapsarian Hamlet to which they long to return.
I think also that the history of criticism shows us too ready to indulge a not wholly explicable fancy that in Hamlet we behold the frustrated and inarticulate Shakespeare furiously wagging his tail in an effort to tell us something, but, as I said before, the accidents of our texts of Hamlet and the alluring analogies they father render Hamlet more liable to interpretive assistance than even the other plays of Shakespeare. Moreover, Hamlet was of course born into the culture of Western Europe, our culture, whose every thought—literary or nonliterary—is shaped by the Platonic presumption that the reality of anything is other than its apparent self. In such a culture it is no wonder that critics prefer the word meaning (which implies effort rather than success) to saying, and that in turn they would rather talk about what a work says or shows (both of which suggest the hidden essence bared of the dross of physicality) than talk about what it does. Even stylistic critics are most comfortable and acceptable when they reveal that rhythm, syntax, diction, or (and above all) imagery are vehicles for meaning. Among people to whom “It means a lot to me” says “I value it,” in a language where significant and valuable are synonyms, it was all but inevitable that a work with the peculiarities of Hamlet should have been treated as a distinguished and yearning failure.
Perhaps the value of Hamlet is where it is most measurable, in the degree to which it fulfills one or another of the fixable identities it suggests for itself or that are suggested for it, but I think that before we choose and argue for one of the ideal forms toward which Hamlet seems to be moving, and before we attribute its value to an exaggeration of the degree to which it gets there, it is reasonable to talk about what the play does do and to test the suggestion that in a valued play what it does do is what we value. I propose to look at Hamlet for what it undeniably is: a succession of actions upon the understanding of an audience. I set my hypothetical audience to watch Hamlet in the text edited by Willard Farnham in The Pelican Shakespeare,1 a text presumably too long to have fitted into the daylight available to a two o’clock performance, but still an approximation of what Shakespeare’s company played.
The action that the first scene of Hamlet takes upon the understanding of its audience is like the action of the whole, and most of the individual actions that make up the whole. The first scene is insistently incoherent and just as insistently coherent. It frustrates and fulfills expectations simultaneously. The challenge and response in the first lines are perfectly predictable sentry-talk, but—as has been well and often observed—the challenger is the wrong man, the relieving sentry and not the one on duty. A similarly faint intellectual uneasiness is provoked when the first personal note in the play sets up expectations that the play then ignores. Francisco says, “For this relief much thanks. ’Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart” (1.1.8–9). We want to know why he is sick at heart. Several lines later Francisco leaves the stage and is forgotten. The scene continues smoothly as if the audience had never focused on Francisco’s heartsickness. Twice in the space of less than a minute the audience has an opportunity to concern itself with a trouble that vanishes from consciousness almost before it is there. The wrong sentry challenges, and the other corrects the oddity instantly. Francisco is sick at heart, but neither he nor Bernardo gives any sign that further comment might be in order. The routine of sentry-go, its special diction, and its commonplaces continue across the audience’s momentary tangential journey; the audience returns as if it and not the play had wandered. The audience’s sensation of being unexpectedly and very slightly out of step is repeated regularly in Hamlet.
The first thing an audience in a theater wants to know is why it is in the theater. Even one that, like Shakespeare’s audiences for Richard II or Julius Caesar or Hamlet, knows the story being dramatized wants to hear out the familiar terms of the situation and the terms of the particular new dramatization. Audiences want their bearings and expect them to be given. The first thing we see in Hamlet is a pair of sentries. The sight of sentries in real life is insignificant, but, when a work of art focuses on sentries, it is usually a sign that what they are guarding is going to be attacked. Thus, the first answer we have to the question “what is this play about?” is “military threat to a castle and a king,” and that leads to our first specific question: “what is that threat?” Horatio’s first question (“What, has this thing appeared again to-night?” 1.1.21) is to some extent an answer to the audience’s question; its terms are not military, but their implications are appropriately threatening. Bernardo then begins elaborate preparations to tell Horatio what the audience must hear if it is ever to be intellectually comfortable in the play. The audience has slightly adjusted its expectations to accord with a threat that is vaguely supernatural rather than military, but the metaphor of assault in which Bernardo prepares to carry the audience further along its new path of inquiry is pertinent to the one from which it has just deviated:
Sit down awhile,
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story,
What we two nights have seen. (1.1.30–33)
We are led toward increased knowledge of the new object—the ghost—in terms appropriate to the one we assumed and have just abandoned—military assault. Bernardo’s metaphor is obviously pertinent to his occupation as sentinel, but in the metaphor he is not the defender but the assailant of ears fortified against his story. As the audience listens, its understanding shifts from one system of pertinence to another; but each perceptible change in the direction of our concern or the terms of our thinking is balanced by the repetition of some continuing factor in the scene; the mind of the audience is in constant but gentle flux, always shifting but never completely leaving familiar ground.
Everyone onstage sits down to hear Bernardo speak of the events of the past two nights. The audience is invited to settle its mind for a long and desired explanation. The construction of Bernardo’s speech suggests that it will go on for a long time; he takes three lines (1.1.35–38) to arrive at the grammatical subject of his sentence, and then, as he begins another parenthetical delay in his long journey toward a verb, “the bell then beating one,” Enter Ghost. The interrupting action is not a simple interruption. The description is interrupted by a repetition of the action described. The entrance of the ghost duplicates on a larger scale the kind of mental experience we have had before. It both fulfills and frustrates our expectations: it is what we expect and desire, an action to account for our attention to sentinels; it is unexpected and unwanted, an interruption in the syntactical routine of the exposition that was on its way to fulfilling the same function. While the ghost is on the stage and during the speculation that immediately follows its departure, the futile efforts of Horatio and the sentries (who, as watchers and waiters, have resembled the audience from the start) are like those of the audience in its quest for information. Marcellus’s statement about the ghost is a fair comment on the whole scene: “’Tis gone and will not answer” (1.1.52), and Horatio’s “In what particular thought to work I know not” (1.1.67) describes the mental condition evoked in an audience by this particular dramatic presentation of events as well as it does that evoked in the character by the events of the fiction.
Horatio continues from there into the first statement in the play that is responsive to an audience’s requirement of an opening scene, an indication of the nature and direction of the play to follow: “But, in the gross and scope of my opinion, / This bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.68–69). That vague summary of the significance of the ghost is political, but only incidentally so because the audience, which was earlier attuned to political/military considerations, has now given its attention to the ghost. Then, with only the casual preamble of the word state, Marcellus asks a question irrelevant to the audience’s newly primary concerns, precisely the question that no one asked when the audience first wanted to know why it was watching the sentries, the question about the fictional situation whose answer would have satisfied the audience’s earlier question about its own situation: Marcellus asks “Why this same strict and most observant watch / So nightly toils the subject of the land” (1.1.71–72). Again what we are given is and is not pertinent to our concerns and expectations. This particular variety among the manifestations of simultaneous and equal propriety and impropriety in Hamlet occurs over and over again. Throughout the play, the audience gets information or sees action it once wanted only after a new interest has superseded the old. For one example, when Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus arrive in the second scene (1.2.159), they come to do what they promise to do at the end of scene one, where they tell the audience that the way to information about the ghost is through young Hamlet. By the time they arrive “where we shall find him most conveniently,” the audience has a new concern—the relation of Claudius to Gertrude and of Hamlet to both. Of course interruptions of one train of thought by the introduction of another are not only common in Hamlet but a commonplace of literature in general. However, although the audience’s frustrations and the celerity with which it transfers its concern are similar to those of audiences of, say, Dickens, there is the important difference in Hamlet that there are no sharp lines of demarcation. In Hamlet the audience does not so much shift its focus as come to find its focus shifted.
Again the first scene provides a type of the whole. When Marcellus asks why the guard is so strict, his question is rather more violent than not in its divergence from our concern for the boding of the ghost. The answer to Marcellus’s question, however, quickly pertains to the subject of ours: Horatio’s explanation of the political situation depends from actions of “Our last king, / Whose image even but now appeared to us” (1.1.80–81), and his description of the activities of young Fortinbras as “The source of this our watch” is harnessed to our concern about the ghost by Bernardo, who says directly, if vaguely, that the political situation is pertinent to the walking of the ghost:
I think it be no other but e’en so.
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armèd through our watch so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars. (1.1.108–11)
Horatio reinforces the relevance of politics to ghosts in a long speech about supernatural events on the eve of Julius Caesar’s murder. Both these speeches establishing pertinence are good examples of the sort of thing I mean: both seem impertinent digressions, sufficiently so to have been omitted from the folios.
Now for the second time, Enter Ghost. The reentrance after a long and wandering digression is in itself an assertion of the continuity, constancy, and unity of the scene. Moreover, the situation into which the ghost reenters is a careful echo of the one into which it first entered, with the difference that the promised length of the earlier exposition is fulfilled in the second. These are the lines surrounding the first entrance; the italics are mine and indicate words, sounds, and substance echoed later:
Horatio. Well, sit we down,
And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.
Bernardo. Last night of all,
When yond same star that’s westward from the pole
Had made his course t’ illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one— Enter Ghost.
Marcellus. Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. (1.1.33–40)
Two or three minutes later a similar situation takes shape in words that echo, and in some cases repeat, those at the earlier entrance
Marcellus. Good now, sit down, and tell me he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch,
So nightly toils the subject of the land . . . . . . Enter Ghost
But soft, behold, lo where it comes again! (1.1.70–72, 126).
After the ghost departs on the crowing of the cock, the conversation, already extravagant and erring before the second apparition when it ranged from Danish history into Roman, meanders into a seemingly gratuitous preoccupation with the demonology of cocks (1.1.148–65). Then—into a scene that has from the irregularly regular entrance of the two sentinels been a succession of simultaneously expected and unexpected entrances—enters “the morn in russet mantle clad,” bringing a great change from darkness to light, from the unknown and unnatural to the known and natural, but also presenting itself personified as another walker, one obviously relevant to the situation and to the discussion of crowing cocks, and one described in subdued but manifold echoes of the two entrances of the ghost. Notice particularly the multitude of different kinds of relationship in which “yon high eastward hill” echoes “yond same star that’s westward from the pole”:
But look, the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
Break we our watch up. . . . (1.1.166–68)
The three speeches (1.1.148–73—Horatio’s on the behavior of ghosts at cockcrow, Marcellus’s on cocks at Christmas time, and Horatio’s on the dawn) have four major elements running through them: cocks, spirits, sunrise, and the presence or absence of speech. All four are not present all the time, but the speeches have a sound of interconnection and relevance to one another. This at the same time that the substance of Marcellus’s speech on Christmas is just as urgently irrelevant to the concerns of the scene. As a gratuitous discussion of Christianity, apparently linked to its context only by an accident of poulterer’s lore, it is particularly irrelevant to the moral limits usual to revenge tragedy. The sequence of these last speeches is like the whole scene and the play in being both coherent and incoherent. Watching and comprehending the scene is an intellectual triumph for its audience. From sentence to sentence, from event to event, as the scene goes on it makes the mind of its audience capable of containing materials that seem always about to fly apart. The scene gives its audience a temporary and modest but real experience of being a superhumanly capable mental athlete. The whole play is like that.
During the first scene of Hamlet two things are threatened, one in the play, and one by the play. Throughout the scene the characters look at all threats as threats to the state, and specifically to the reigning king. As the king is threatened in scene one, so is the audience’s understanding threatened by scene one. The audience wants some solid information about what is going on in this play. Scene one is set in the dark, and it leaves the audience in the dark. The first things the play teaches us to value are the order embodied in the king and the rational sureness, purpose, and order that the play as a play lacks in its first scene. Scene two presents both the desired orders at once and in one—the king, whose name even in scene one was not only synonymous with order but was the regular sign by which order was reasserted: the first confusion—who should challenge whom—was resolved in line three by “Long live the king”; and at the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus, rightness and regularity were vouched for by “Friends to this ground. And liegemen to the Dane.” As scene two begins it is everything the audience wanted most in scene one. Here it is daylight, everything is clear, everything is systematic. Unlike scene one, this scene is physically orderly; it begins with a royal procession, businesslike and unmistakable in its identity. Unlike the first scene, the second gives the audience all the information it could desire, and gives it neatly. The direct source of both information and orderliness is Claudius, who addresses himself one by one to the groups on the stage and to the problems of the realm, punctuating the units both with little statements of conclusion like “For all, our thanks” and “So much for him” (1.2.16, 25), and with the word “now” (1.2.17, 26, 42, 64), by which he signals each remove to a new listener and topic. Denmark and the play are both now orderly, and are so because of the king. In its specifics, scene two is the opposite of scene one. Moreover, where scene one presented an incoherent surface whose underlying coherence is only faintly felt, this scene is the opposite. In scene one the action taken by the scene—it makes its audience perceive diffusion and fusion, division and unification, difference and likeness at once—is only an incidental element in the action taken or discussed in the scene—the guards have trouble recognizing each other; the defense preparation “does not divide the Sunday from the week,” and makes “the night joint-laborer with the day” (1.1.76, 78). In scene two the first subject taken up by Claudius, and the subject of first importance to Hamlet, is itself an instance of improbable unification—the unnatural natural union of Claudius and Gertrude. Where scene one brought its audience to feel coherence in incoherence by response to systems of organization other than those of logical or narrative sequence, scene two brings its audience to think of actions and characters alternately and sometimes nearly simultaneously in systems of value whose contradictory judgments rarely collide in the mind of an audience. From an uneasiness prompted by a sense of lack of order, unity, coherence, and continuity, we have progressed to an uneasiness prompted by a sense of their excess.
Claudius is everything the audience most valued in scene one, but he is also and at once contemptible. His first sentences are unifications in which his discretion overwhelms things whose natures are oppugnant. The simple but contorted statement, “therefore our . . . sister . . . have we . . . taken to wife,” takes Claudius more than six lines to say; it is plastered together with a succession of subordinate unnatural unions made smooth by rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and syntactical balance:
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ‘twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife. (1.2.8–14)
What he says is overly orderly. The rhythms and rhetoric by which he connects any contraries, moral or otherwise, are too smooth. Look at the complex phonetic equation that gives a sound of decorousness to the moral indecorum of “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” Claudius uses syntactical and rhetorical devices for equation by balance—as one would a particularly heavy and greasy cosmetic—to smooth over any inconsistencies whatsoever. Even his incidental diction is of joining: “jointress,” “disjoint,” “Colleaguèd” (1.2.9, 20, 21). The excessively lubricated rhetoric by which Claudius makes unnatural connections between moral contraries is as gross and sweaty as the incestuous marriage itself. The audience has double and contrary responses to Claudius, the unifier of contraries.
Scene two presents still another kind of double understanding in double frames of reference. Claudius is the primary figure in the hierarchy depicted—he is the king; he is also the character upon whom all the other characters focus their attention; he does most of the talking. An audience focuses its attention on him. On the other hand, one of the members of the royal procession was dressed all in black—a revenger to go with the presumably vengeful ghost in scene one. Moreover, the man in black is probably also the most famous actor in England (or at least of the company). The particulars of the scene make Claudius the focal figure, the genre and the particulars of a given performance focus the audience’s attention on Hamlet.
When the two focuses come together (“But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—”), Hamlet’s reply (1.2.65) is spoken not to the king but to the audience. “A little more than kin, and less than kind” is the first thing spoken by Hamlet and the first thing spoken aside to the audience. With that line Hamlet takes the audience for his own, and gives himself to the audience as its agent on the stage. Hamlet and the audience are from this point in the play more firmly united than any other such pair in Shakespeare, and perhaps in dramatic literature.
Claudius’s “my cousin Hamlet, and my son” is typical of his stylistic unifications of mutually exclusive contrary ideas (cousin, son). Hamlet’s reply does not unify ideas, but disunifies them (more than kin, less than kind). However, the style in which Hamlet distinguishes is a caricature of Claudius’s equations by rhetorical balance; here again, what interrupts the order, threatens coherence, and is strikingly at odds with its preamble is also a continuation by echo of what went before. Hamlet’s parody of Claudius and his refusal to be folded into Claudius’s rhetorical blanket is satisfying to an audience in need of assurance that it is not alone in its uneasiness at Claudius’s rhetoric. On the other hand, the orderliness that the audience valued in scene two is abruptly destroyed by Hamlet’s reply. At the moment Hamlet speaks his first line, the audience finds itself the champion of order in Denmark and in the play, and at the same time irrevocably allied to Hamlet—the one present threat to the order of both.
The play persists in taking its audience to the brink of intellectual terror. The mind of the audience is rarely far from the intellectual desperation of Claudius in the prayer scene when the systems in which he values his crown and queen collide with those in which he values his soul and peace of mind. For the duration of Hamlet the mind of the audience is as it might be if it could take on, or dared to try to take on, its experience whole, if it dared drop the humanly necessary intellectual crutches of compartmentalization, point of view, definition, and the idea of relevance, if it dared admit any subject for evaluation into any and all the systems of value to which at different times one human mind subscribes. The constant occupation of a sane mind is to choose, establish, and maintain frames of reference for the things of its experience; as the high value placed on artistic unity attests, one of the attractions of art is that it offers a degree of holiday from that occupation. As the creation of a human mind, art comes to its audience ready-fitted to the human mind; it has physical limits or limits of duration; its details are subordinated to one another in a hierarchy of importance. A play guarantees us that we will not have to select a direction for our attention; it offers us isolation from matter and considerations irrelevant to a particular focus or a particular subject. Hamlet is more nearly an exception to those rules than other satisfying and bearable works of art. That, perhaps, is the reason so much effort has gone into interpretations that presume that Hamlet, as it is, is not and was not satisfying and bearable. The subject of literature is often conflict, often conflict of values; but, though the agonies of decision, knowing, and valuing are often the objects of an audience’s concern, an audience rarely undergoes or even approaches such agonies itself. That it should enjoy doing so seems unlikely, but in Hamlet the problems the audience thinks about and the intellectual action of thinking about them are very similar. Hamlet is the tragedy of an audience that cannot make up its mind.
One of the most efficient, reliable, and usual guarantees of isolation is genre. The appearance of a ghost in scene one suggests that the play will be a revenge tragedy. Hamlet does indeed turn out to be a revenge tragedy, but here genre does not provide the limited frame of reference that the revenge genre and genres in general usually establish. The archetypal revenge play is The Spanish Tragedy. In the first scene of that, a ghost and a personification, Revenge, walk out on the stage and spend a whole scene saying who they are, where they are, why they are there, what has happened, and what will happen. The ghost in The Spanish Tragedy gives more information in the first five lines of the play than there is in the whole first scene of Hamlet. In The Spanish Tragedy the ghost and Revenge act as a chorus for the play. They keep the doubt and turmoil of the characters from ever transferring themselves to the audience. They keep the audience safe from doubt, safely outside the action, looking on. In The Spanish Tragedy the act of revenge is presented as a moral necessity, just as, say, shooting the villain may be in a Western. Revenge plays were written by Christians and played to Christian audiences. Similarly, traditional American Westerns were written by and for believers faithful to the principles of the Constitution of the United States. The possibility that an audience’s Christian belief that vengeance belongs only to God will color its understanding of revenge in The Spanish Tragedy is as unlikely as a modern film audience’s consideration of a villain’s civil rights when somebody shouts, “Head him off at the pass.” The tension between revenge morality and the audience’s own Christian morality was a source of vitality always available to Kyd and his followers, but one that they did not avail themselves of. Where they did not ignore moralities foreign to the vaguely Senecan ethic of the genre, they took steps to take the life out of conflicts between contrary systems of value.
When Christian morality invades a revenge play, as it does in 3.13 of The Spanish Tragedy when Hieronimo says Vindicta Mihi and then further echoes St. Paul’s “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,” the quickly watered down Christian position and the contrary position for which Hieronimo rejects it are presented as isolated categories between which the character must and does choose. The conflict is restricted to the stage and removed from the mind of the audience. The effect is not to make the contrariety of values a part of the audience’s experience but to dispel the value system foreign to the genre, to file it away as, for the duration of the play, a dead issue. In its operations upon an audience of The Spanish Tragedy, the introduction and rejection of the Christian view of vengeance is roughly comparable to the hundreds of exchanges in hundreds of Westerns where the new schoolmarm says that the hero should go to the sheriff rather than try to outdraw the villain. The hero rarely gives an intellectually satisfying reason for taking the law into his own hands, but the mere fact that the pertinent moral alternative has been mentioned and rejected is ordinarily sufficient to allow the audience to join the hero in his morality without fear of further interruption from its own.
The audience of Hamlet is not allowed the intellectual comfort of isolation in the one system of values appropriate to the genre. In Hamlet the Christian context for valuing is persistently present. In 1.5 the ghost makes a standard revenge-tragedy statement of Hamlet’s moral obligation to kill Claudius. The audience is quite ready to think in that frame of reference and does so. The ghost then—in the same breath—opens the audience’s mind to the frame of reference least compatible with the genre. When he forbids vengeance upon Gertrude, he does so in specifically Christian terms: “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven” (1.5.85–86). Moreover, this ghost is at least as concerned that he lost the chance to confess before he died as he is that he lost his life at all.
Most of the time contradictory values do not collide in the audience’s consciousness, but the topic of revenge is far from the only instance in which they live anxiously close to one another, so close to one another that, although the audience is not shaken in its faith in either of a pair of conflicting values, its mind remains in the uneasy state common in nonartistic experience but unusual for audiences of plays. The best example is the audience’s thinking about suicide during Hamlet. The first mention of suicide comes already set into a Christian frame of reference by the clause in which self-slaughter is mentioned: “Or that the everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.131–32). In the course of the play, however, an audience evaluates suicide in all the different systems available to minds outside the comfortable limitations of art; from time to time in the play the audience thinks of suicide variously as (1) cause for damnation, (2) a heroic and generous action, (3) a cowardly action, and (4) a last sure way to peace. The audience moves from one to another system of values with a rapidity that human faith in the rational constancy of the human mind makes seem impossible. Look, for example, at the travels of the mind that listens to and understands what goes on between the specifically Christian death of Laertes (Laertes: “Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, / Nor thine on me.”—Hamlet: “Heaven make thee free of it” 5.2.319–21) and the specifically Christian death of Hamlet (Horatio: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” 5.2.348–49). During the intervening thirty lines the audience and the characters move from the Christian context in which Laertes’s soul departs, into the familiar literary context where they can take Horatio’s attempted suicide as the generous and heroic act it is (5.2.324–31). Audience and characters have likewise no difficulty at all in understanding and accepting the label “felicity” for the destination of the suicide—even though Hamlet, the speaker of “Absent thee from felicity awhile” (5.2.336), prefaces the statement with an incidental “By heaven” (5.2.332), and even though Hamlet and the audience have spent a lot of time during the preceding three hours actively considering the extent to which a suicide’s journey to “the undiscovered country” can be called “felicity” or predicted at all. When “Good night, sweet prince” is spoken by the antique Roman of twenty lines before, both he and the audience return to thinking in a Christian frame of reference, as if they had never been away.
The audience is undisturbed by a nearly endless supply of similar inconstancies in itself and the play; these are a few instances:
The same audience that scorned pretense when Hamlet knew not “seems” in 1.2 admires his skill at pretense and detection in the next two acts.
The audience joins Hamlet both in admiration for the self-control by which the player “could force his soul so to his own conceit” that he could cry for Hecuba (2.2.537), and in admiration for the very different self-control of Horatio (3.2.51–71).
The audience, which presumably could not bear to see a literary hero stab an unarmed man at prayer, sees the justice of Hamlet’s self-accusations of delay. The audience also agrees with the ghost when both have a full view of the corpse of Polonius, and when the ghost’s diction is an active reminder of the weapon by which Hamlet has just attempted the acting of the dread command: “Do not forget. This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (3.4.111–12).
The audience that sees the ghost and hears about its prison house in 1.5 also accepts the just as obvious truth of “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
What have come to be recognized as the problems of Hamlet arise at points where an audience’s contrary responses come to consciousness. They are made bearable in performance (though not in recollection) by means similar to those by which the audience is carried across the quieter crises of scene one. In performance, at least, the play gives its audience strength and courage not only to flirt with the frailty of its own understanding but actually to survive conscious experiences of the Polonian foolishness of faith that things will follow only the rules of the particular logic in which we expect to see them. The best example of the audience’s endurance of self-knowledge is its experiences of Hamlet’s madness. In the last moments of Act I, Hamlet makes Horatio, Marcellus, and the audience privy to his intention to pretend madness: “How strange or odd some’er I bear myself / (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on)” (1.5.170–73). The audience sets out into Act 2 knowing what Hamlet knows, knowing Hamlet’s plans, and secure in its superiority to the characters who do not. (Usually an audience is superior to the central characters: it knows that Desdemona is innocent, Othello does not; it knows what it would do when Lear foolishly divides his kingdom; it knows how Birnam Wood came to come to Dunsinane. In Hamlet, however, the audience never knows what it would have done in Hamlet’s situation; in fact, since the king’s successful plot in the duel with Laertes changes Hamlet’s situation so that he becomes as much the avenger of his own death as of his father’s, the audience never knows what Hamlet would have done. except for brief periods near the end of the play, the audience never has insight or knowledge superior to Hamlet’s or, indeed, different from Hamlet’s. Instead of having superiority to Hamlet, the audience goes into the second act to share the superiority of Hamlet.) The audience knows that Hamlet will play mad, and its expectations are quickly confirmed. Just seventy-five lines into Act 2, Ophelia comes in and describes a kind of behavior in Hamlet that sounds like the behavior of a young man of limited theatrical ability who is pretending to be mad (2.1.77–84). Our confidence that this behavior so puzzling to others is well within our grasp is strengthened by the reminder of the ghost, the immediate cause of the promised pretense, in Ophelia’s comparison of Hamlet to a creature “loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors.”
Before Ophelia’s entrance, 2.1 has presented an example of the baseness and foolishness of Polonius, the character upon whom both the audience and Hamlet exercise their superiority throughout Act 2. Polonius seems base because he is arranging to spy on Laertes. He instructs his spy in ways to use the “bait of falsehood”—to find out directions by indirections (2.1.1–74). He is so sure that he knows everything, and so sure that his petty scheme is not only foolproof but brilliant, that he is as contemptible mentally as he is morally. The audience laughs at him because he loses his train of thought in pompous byways, so that, eventually, he forgets what he set out to say: “What was I about to say? . . . I was about to say something! Where did I leave?” (2.1.50–51). When Ophelia reports Hamlet’s behavior, Polonius takes what is apparently Hamlet’s bait: “Mad for thy love?” (2.1.85). He also thinks of (and then spends the rest of the act finding evidence for) a specific cause for Hamlet’s madness: he is mad for love of Ophelia. The audience knows (1) Hamlet will pretend madness, (2) Polonius is a fool, and (3) what is actually bothering Hamlet. Through the rest of the act, the audience laughs at Polonius for being fooled by Hamlet. It continues to laugh at Polonius’s inability to keep his mind on a track (2.2.85–130); it also laughs at him for the opposite fault—he has a one-track mind and sees anything and everything as evidence that Hamlet is mad for love (2.2.173–212, 394–402). Hamlet, whom the audience knows and understands, spends a good part of the rest of the scene making Polonius demonstrate his foolishness.
Then, in Act 3, scene one, the wise audience and the foolish Polonius both become lawful espials of Hamlet’s meeting with Ophelia. Ophelia says that Hamlet made her believe he loved her. Hamlet’s reply might just as well be delivered by the play to the audience: “You should not have believed me” (3.1.117). In his next speech Hamlet appears suddenly, inexplicably, violently, and really mad—this before an audience whose chief identity for the last hour has consisted in its knowledge that Hamlet is only pretending. The audience finds itself guilty of Polonius’s foolish confidence in predictable trains of events. It is presented with evidence for thinking just what it has considered other minds foolish for thinking—that Hamlet is mad, mad for love of an inconstant girl who has betrayed him. Polonius and the audience are the self-conscious and prideful knowers and understanders in the play. They both overestimate the degree of safety they have as innocent onlookers.
When Hamlet seems suddenly mad, the audience is likely for a minute to think that it is mad or that the play is mad. That happens several times in the course of the play; and the play helps audiences toward the decision that the trouble is in themselves. Each time the play seems insane, it also is obviously ordered, orderly, all of a piece. For example, in the case of Hamlet’s truly odd behavior with Ophelia in 3.1, some of the stuff of his speeches to her has been otherwise applied but nonetheless present in the play before (fickleness, cosmetics). Furthermore, after the fact, the play often tells us how we should have reacted; here the king sums up the results of the Ophelia experiment as if they were exactly what the audience expected they would be (which is exactly what they were not): “Love? his affections do not that way tend, / . . . what he spoke . . .. / Was not like madness” (3.1.162–64). In the next scene, Hamlet enters perfectly sane, and lecturing, oddly enough, on what a play should be (3.2.1–42). Whenever the play seems mad it drifts back into focus as if nothing odd had happened. The audience is encouraged to agree with the play that nothing did, to assume (as perhaps for other reasons it should) that its own intellect is inadequate. The audience pulls itself together, and goes on to another crisis of its understanding. Indeed, it had to do so in order to arrive at the crisis of the nunnery speech. At exactly the point where the audience receives the information that makes it so vulnerable to Hamlet’s inexplicable behavior in the nunnery scene, the lines about the antic disposition (1.5.170–73) act as a much needed explanation—after the fact of the audience’s discomfort—of jocular behavior by Hamlet (“Art thou there, truepenny?” “You hear this fellow in the cellarage,” “Well said, old mole!” 1.5.150–51, 162) that is foreign to his tone and attitude earlier in the scene, and that jars with the expectations aroused by the manner in which he and the play have been treating the ghost. For a moment, the play seems to be the work of a madman. Then Hamlet explains what he will do, and the audience is invited to feel lonely in foolishly failing to understand that that was what he was doing before.
The kind of experience an audience has of Hamlet in its large movements is duplicated—and more easily demonstrated—in the microcosm of its responses to brief passages. For example, the act of following the exchange initiated by Polonius’s “What do you read, my Lord?” in 2.2 is similar to the larger experience of coping with the whole career of Hamlet’s madness:
Polonius. . . . What do you read, my Lord?
Hamlet. Words, words, words. Polonius. What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet. Between who?
Polonius. I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet. Slanders, sir, for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.
Polonius. [aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. (2.2.190–204)
The audience is full partner in the first two of Hamlet’s comically absolute answers. The first answer is not what the questioner expects, and we laugh at the mental inflexibility that makes Polonius prey to frustration in an answer that takes the question literally rather than as it is customarily meant in similar contexts. In his first question Polonius assumes that what he says will have meaning only within the range appropriate to the context in which he speaks. In his second he acts to limit the frame of reference of the first question, but, because “What is the matter?” is a standard idiom in another context, it further widens the range of reasonable but unexpected understanding. On his third try Polonius achieves a question whose range is as limited as his meaning. The audience—composed of smug initiates in Hamlet’s masquerade and companions in his cleverness—expects to revel further in the comic revelation of Polonius’s limitations. Hamlet’s answer begins by letting us laugh at the discomfiture inherent for Polonius in a list of “slanders” of old men. Because of its usual applications, the word “slander” suggests that what is so labeled is not only painful but untrue. Part of the joke here is that these slanders are true. When Hamlet finishes his list, he seems about to continue in the same vein and to demonstrate his madness by saying something like “All which, sir, though . . . , yet are lies.” Instead, a syntactical machine (“though . . . yet”), rhetorical emphasis (“powerfully and potently”), and diction (“believe”) suitable for the expected denial are used to admit the truth of the slanders: “All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for you yourself, sir.” The speech seems to have given up comic play on objection to slanders on grounds of untruth, and to be about to play from an understanding of “slander” as injurious whether true or not. The syntax of “I hold it not honesty . . . , for” signals that a reason for Hamlet’s objections will follow, and—in a context where the relevance of the slanders to Polonius gives pain enough to justify suppression of geriatric commonplaces—“for you yourself, sir” signals the probable general direction of the explanation. So far the audience has followed Hamlet’s wit without difficulty from one focus to another, but now the bottom falls out from under the audience’s own Polonian assumption, in this case the assumption that Hamlet will pretend madness according to pattern: “for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.” This last is exactly the opposite of what Polonius calls it, this is madness without method.
The audience finds itself trying to hear sense in madness; it suddenly undergoes experience of the fact that Polonius’s assumptions about cause and effect in life and language are no more arbitrary and vulnerable than its own. The audience has been where it has known that the idea of sanity is insane, but it is there very briefly; it feels momentarily lonely and lost—as it feels when it has failed to get a joke or when a joke has failed to be funny. The play continues blandly across the gulf. Polonius’s comment reflects comically on the effects on him of the general subject of old age; the banter between Hamlet and Polonius picks up again; and Polonius continues his self-confident diagnostic asides to the audience. Moreover, the discussion of Hamlet’s reading is enclosed by two passages that have strong nonlogical, nonsignificant likeness to one another in the incidental materials they share—breeding, childbearing, death, and walking:
Hamlet. For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?
Polonius. I have, my lord.
Hamlet. Let her not walk i’ th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to’t.
Polonius. [aside] How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter. Yet he knew me not at first. ‘A said I was a fishmonger. ‘A is far gone, far gone. And truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this. I’ll speak to him again.—What do you read, my lord? (2.2.181–90)
Polonius. [aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.—Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
Hamlet. Into my grave?
Polonius. Indeed, that’s out of the air. [aside] How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of. (2.2.203–9)
From beginning to end, in all sizes and kinds of materials, the play offers its audience an actual and continuing experience of perceiving a multitude of intense relationships in an equal multitude of different systems of coherence, systems not subordinated to one another in a hierarchy of relative power. The way to an answer to “What is so good about Hamlet?” may be in an answer to the same question about its most famous part, the “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
The soliloquy sets out with ostentatious deliberation, rationality, and precision. Hamlet fixes and limits his subject with authority and—considering that his carefully defined subject takes in everything humanly conceivable—with remarkable confidence: “To be, or not to be—that is the question.” He then restates and further defines the question in four lines that echo the physical proportions of “To be or not to be” (two lines on the positive, two on the negative) and also echo the previous grammatical construction (“to suffer . . . or to take arms”):
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. (3.1.57–60)
The speech is determinedly methodical about defining a pair of alternatives that should be as easily distinguishable as any pair imaginable; surely being and not being are distinct from one another. The next sentence continues the pattern of infinitives, but it develops the idea of “not to be” instead of continuing the positive–negative alternation followed before:
To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. (3.1.60–64)
As an audience listens to and comprehends the three units “To die,” “to sleep,” and “No more,” some intellectual uneasiness should impinge upon it. “To sleep” is in apposition to “to die,” and their equation is usual and perfectly reasonable. However, death and sleep are also a traditional type of unlikeness; they could as well restate “to be or not to be” (to sleep or to die) as “not to be” alone. Moreover, since to die is to sleep, and is also to sleep no more, no vocal emphasis or no amount of editorial punctuation will limit the relationship between “to sleep” and “no more.” Thus, when “and by a sleep to say we end” reasserts the metaphoric equation of death and sleep, the listener feels a sudden and belated need to have heard “no more” as the isolated summary statement attempted by the punctuation of modern texts. What is happening here is that the apparently sure distinction between “to be” and “not to be” is becoming less and less easy to maintain. The process began even in the methodically precise first sentence where passivity to death-dealing slings and arrows described “to be,” and the positive aggressive action of taking arms described the negative state, “not to be.” Even earlier, the listener experienced a substantially irrelevant instability of relationship when “in the mind” attached first to “nobler,” indicating the sphere of the nobility, and then to “suffer,” indicating the sphere of the suffering: “nobler in the mind to suffer.”
“The thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to” further denies the simplicity of the initial alternatives by opening the mind of the listener to considerations excluded by the isolated question whether it is more pleasant to live or to die; the substance of the phrase is a summary of the pains of life, but its particulars introduce the idea of duty. “Heir” is particularly relevant to the relationship and duty of Hamlet to his father; it also implies a continuation of conditions from generation to generation that is generally antithetical to any assumption of finality in death. The diction of the phrase also carries with it a suggestion of the Christian context in which flesh is heir to the punishment of Adam; the specifically religious word “devoutly” in the next sentence opens the idea of suicide to the Christian ethic from which the narrowed limits of the first sentences had briefly freed it.
While the logical limits and controls of the speech are falling away, its illogical patterns are giving it their own coherence. For example, the constancy of the infinitive construction maintains an impression that the speech is proceeding as methodically as it began; the word “to,” in its infinitive use and otherwise, appears thirteen times among the eighty-five words in the first ten lines of the soliloquy. At the same time that the listener is having trouble comprehending the successive contradictions of “To die, to sleep— / No more—and by a sleep to say we end,” he also hears at the moment of crisis a confirming echo of the first three syllables and the word “end” from “and by opposing end them” in the first three syllables and word “end” in “and by a sleep to say we end.” As the speech goes on, as it loses more and more of its rational precision, and as “to be” and “not to be” become less and less distinguishable, rhetorical coherence continues in force. The next movement of the speech begins with a direct repetition, in the same metrical position in the line, of the words with which the previous movement began: “To die, to sleep.” The new movement seems, as each new movement has seemed, to introduce a restatement of what has gone before; the rhetorical construction of the speech insists that all the speech does is make the distinct natures of “to be” and “not to be” clearer and clearer:
To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life. (3.1.64–69)
As Hamlet describes his increasing difficulty in seeing death as the simple opposite of life, the manner of his description gives his listener an actual experience of that difficulty; “shuffled off this mortal coil” says “cast off the turmoil of this life,” but “shuffled off” and “coil” both suggest the rejuvenation of a snake which, having once thrown her enamell’d skin, reveals another just like it underneath. The listener also continues to have difficulty with the simple action of understanding; like the nature of the things discussed, the natures of the sentences change as they are perceived: “what dreams may come” is a common construction for a question, and the line that follows sounds like a subordinate continuation of the question; it is not until we hear “must give us pause” that we discover that “what dreams may come” is a noun phrase, the subject of a declarative sentence that only comes into being with the late appearance of an unexpected verb. In the next sentence (“There’s the respect / That makes calamity of so long life”), logic requires that we understand “makes calamity so long-lived,” but our habitual understanding of “makes . . . of” constructions and our recent indoctrination in the pains of life make us likely to hear the contradictory, illogical, and yet appropriate “makes a long life a calamity.”
Again, however, the lines sound ordered and reasonable. The rejected first impressions I have just described are immediately followed by a real question, and one that is largely an insistently long list of things that make life a monotonously painful series of calamities. Moreover, nonlogical coherence is provided by the quiet and intricate harmony of “to dream,” “of death,” and “shuffled off” in the metrical centers of three successive lines; by the echo of the solidly metaphoric “there’s the rub” in the vague “there’s the respect”; and by the repetition of “for” from “For in that sleep” to begin the next section of the speech.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of? (3.1.70–82)
Although the list in the first question is disjointed and rhythmically frantic, the impression of disorder is countered by the regularity of the definite article, and by the inherently conjunctive action of six possessives. The possessives in ‘s, the possessives in of and the several nonpossessive of constructions are themselves an underlying pattern of simultaneous likeness and difference. So is the illogical pattern present in the idea of burdens, the word “bear,” and the word “bare.” The line in which the first of these questions ends and the second begins is an epitome of the construction and action of the speech: “With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear.” The two precisely equal halves of a single rhythmic unit hold together two separate syntactical units. The beginning of the new sentence, “Who would fardels bear,” echoes both the beginning, “For who would bear,” and the sound of one word, “bare,” from the end of the old. Moreover, “bare” and “bear,” two words that are both the same and different, participate here in statements of the two undistinguishable alternatives: “to be, or not to be”—to bear fardels, or to kill oneself with a bare bodkin.
The end of the speech sounds like the rationally achieved conclusion of just such a rational investigation as Hamlet began. It begins with thus, the sign of logical conclusion, and it gains a sound of inevitable truth and triumphant clarity from the incremental repetition of and at the beginning of every other line. The last lines are relevant to Hamlet’s behavior in the play at large and therefore have an additional sound of rightness here. Not only are the lines broadly appropriate to the play, the audience’s understanding of them is typical of its understanding throughout the play and of its understanding of the previous particulars of this speech: Hamlet has hesitated to kill Claudius. Consideration of suicide has seemed a symptom of that hesitancy. Here the particular from which Hamlet’s conclusions about his inability to act derive is his hesitancy to commit suicide. The audience hears those conclusions in the context of his failure to take the action that suicide would avoid.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. (3.1.83–88)
These last lines are accidentally a compendium of phrases descriptive of the action of the speech and the process of hearing it. The speech puzzles the will, but it makes us capable of facing and bearing puzzlement. The “To be or not to be” soliloquy is a type of the over-all action of Hamlet. In addition, a soliloquy in which being and its opposite are indistinguishable is peculiarly appropriate to a play otherwise full of easily distinguishable pairs that are not easily distinguished from one another by characters or audience or both: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the pictures of Gertrude’s two husbands (3.4.54–68); the hawk and the handsaw (2.2.370); and father and mother who are one flesh and so undistinguished in Hamlet’s farewell to Claudius (4.3.48–51). The soliloquy is above all typical of a play whose last moments enable its audience to look unblinking upon a situation in which Hamlet, the finally successful revenger, is the object of Laertes’s revenge; a situation in which Laertes, Hamlet’s victim, victimizes Hamlet; a situation in which Fortinbras, the threat to Denmark’s future in scene one, is its hope for political salvation; in short, a situation in which any identity can be indistinguishable from its opposite. The soliloquy, the last scene, the first scene, the play—each and together—make an impossible coherence of truths that are both undeniably incompatible and undeniably coexistent.
The kind of criticism I am doing here may be offensive to readers conditioned to think of revelation as the value of literature and the purpose of criticism. The things I have said about Hamlet may be made more easily palatable by the memory that illogical coherence—coherent madness—is a regular topic of various characters who listen to Hamlet and Ophelia. In the Reynaldo scene (2.1) and Hamlet’s first talk with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the power of rhetoric and context to make a particular either good or bad at will is also a topic in the play. So too is the perception of clouds which may in a moment look “like a camel indeed,” and “like a weasel” and be “very like a whale” (3.2.361–67).
What I am doing may seem antipoetical; it should not. On the contrary, the effects I have described in Hamlet are of the same general kind as the nonsignificant coherences made by rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and others of the standard devices of prosody. For example, the physics of the relationship among Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras, and Pyrrhus, the four avenging sons in Hamlet, are in their own scale and substance the same as those of the relationship among cat, rat, bat, and chat. The theme of suicide, for all the inconstancy of its fluid moral and emotional value, is a constant and unifying factor in the play. So too is the theme of appearance and reality, deceit, pretense, disguise, acting, seeming, and cosmetics which gives the play coherence even though its values are as many as its guises and labels. The analogy of rhyme or of a pair of like-metered lines applies profitably to the nonsignifying relationship between Hamlet’s two interviews with women. Both the nunnery scene with Ophelia and the closet scene with Gertrude are stage-managed and overlooked by Polonius; neither lady understands Hamlet; both are amazed by his intensity; in both scenes Hamlet makes a series of abortive departures before his final exit. There is a similar kind of insignificant likeness in numerous repeated patterns of scenes and situations like that of Hamlet’s entrance reading in 2.2 and its echo in Ophelia’s show of devotional reading in 3.1. Indeed, the same sort of thing can be said about any of the themes and images whose value critics have tried to convert to significance.
The tools of prosody and the phenomena I have talked about show their similarity well when they cooperate in Hamlet’s little poem on perception and truth, a poem that is a model of the experience of the whole play. Polonius reads it to the king and queen:
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love. (2.2.116–19)
I suggest that the pleasure of intellectual possession evoked by perception of the likeness and difference of “fire” and “liar” and of “move” and “love,” or among the four metrically like and unlike lines, or between the three positive clauses and the one negative one, or between “stars” and “sun” or “truth” and “liar” is of the same kind as the greater achievement of intellectual mastery of the greater challenge presented by “doubt” in the first three lines. The first two doubts demand disbelief of two things that common sense cannot but believe. The third, whose likeness to the first two is insisted upon by anaphora, is made unlike them by the words that follow it: disbelief that truth is a liar is a logical necessity; therefore, “doubt” here must mean “believe” or “incline to believe” as it does earlier in this scene (line 56) and several other times in the play. To be consistent with the pair of hyperbolic impossibilities to which it is coupled, and to fit the standard rhetorical formula (Doubt what cannot be doubted, but do not doubt . . .) in which it appears, “Doubt truth to be a liar” must be understood in a way inconsistent with another pattern of the poem, the previously established meaning of “doubt.” Even the first two lines, which seem to fit the hyperbolic formula so well, may make the poem additionally dizzying because their subject matter could remind a Renaissance listener (once disturbed by the reversal of the meaning of the third “doubt”) of doubts cast upon common-sense impressions by still recent astronomical discoveries, notably that the diurnal motion of the sun is an illusion.
The urgent rhetorical coherence of the poem is like that of the play. As the multitude of insistent and overlapping systems of coherence in the poem allows its listener to hold the two contradictory meanings of “doubt” in colloid-like suspension and to experience both the actions “doubt” describes, so in the play at large an alliteration of subjects—a sort of rhythm of ideas whose substance may or may not inform the situation dramatized—gives shape and identity, nonphysical substance, to the play that contains the situation. Such a container allows Shakespeare to replace conclusion with inclusion; it provides a particular and temporary context that overcomes the intellectual terror ordinarily inherent in looking at an action in all the value systems it invades. Such a container provides a sense of order and limitation sufficient to replace the comforting boundaries of carefully isolated frames of reference; it makes its audience capable of contemplating more truth than the mind should be able to bear.
In summary I would say that the thing about Hamlet that has put Western man into a panic to explain it is not that the play is incoherent, but that it is coherent. There are plenty of incoherent plays; nobody ever looks at them twice. This one, because it obviously makes sense and because it just as obviously cannot be made sense of, threatens our inevitable working assumption that there are no “more things in earth” than can be understood in one philosophy. People see Hamlet and tolerate inconsistencies that it does not seem they could bear. Students of the play have explained that such people do not, in fact, find the play bearable at all. They therefore whittle the play down for us to the size of one of its terms, and deny the others. Truth is bigger than any one system for knowing it, and Hamlet is bigger than any of the frames of reference it inhabits. Hamlet allows us to comprehend—hold on to—all the contradictions it contains. Hamlet refuses to cradle its audience’s mind in a closed generic framework, or otherwise limit the ideological context of its actions. In Hamlet the mind is cradled in nothing more than the fabric of the play. The superior strength and value of that fabric is in the sense it gives that it is unlimited in its range, and that its audience is not only sufficient to comprehend but is in the act of achieving total comprehension of all the perceptions to which its mind can open. The source of the strength is in a rhetorical economy that allows the audience to perform both of the basic actions of the mind upon almost every conjunction of elements in the course of the play: it perceives strong likeness, and it perceives strong difference. Every intellectual conjunction is also a disjunction, and any two things that pull apart contain qualities that are simultaneously the means of uniting them.
Note
1. Hamlet, rev. ed., ed. Willard Farnham, The Pelican Shakespeare (1957; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1984).